


Inhaling The Different Dawn

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 09:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3130277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My pre-IWTB attempt at a fic based on the IWTB trailer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inhaling The Different Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to Scarlet Baldy, my indefatigable beta. We were discussing scenarios for the new movie and I mentioned thinking they might have been in a marriage/domestic partnership post The Truth. And the living together aspect of the relationship went off-track, but that they stayed very close with one another. Scarlet said she'd like to read something like that. So this was my thank-you gift to her for hours and hours of beta reading. The title is her own by way of Emily Dickinson.

"It's him," hissed Alice to Lydia. "Go get Dr. Scully."  
  
Lydia rolled her eyes and then craned her neck around the nurses' station to see him.  
  
"He looks like sex on a stick," cooed Alice, who had four children and a husband who did not wear his leather jacket as well as Mr. Mulder did.  
  
"He looks like trouble," observed Lydia darkly. She had never been married because she kept falling in love with men who looked bad and dangerous like Mr. Mulder and they invariably broke her heart. "I wish he wouldn't come here."  
  
"Go get Dr. Scully," repeated Alice, hoping Mr. Mulder would turn around because she liked the way his butt looked in his jeans.  
  
Lydia sighed and wandered down the hall and into the break room where she saw the back of Dana's tawny head. She walked over and tugged the long, mussed braid. "Hey girl."  
  
Dana took a swig of coffee from her Styrofoam cup and looked up from a stack of paperwork. "Hey yourself. Keep me company?"  
  
Lydia crossed her arms and assumed a disapproving expression. "He's here again. Your ex."  
  
"What? Where?" She put the cup down on the long table and stood, brushing the crumbs of a vending machine danish from her khakis.  
  
Lydia waved her hand in the general direction of the nurses' station. "Out front. Being pestered by Alice, no doubt. I'd have paged you but I figured you'd want warning."  
  
"Thanks Lydia."  
  
Lydia grinned sympathetically. "Is he the one who bought you that pretty new car?"  
  
"It was an amicable parting," Dana laughed, not clarifying any further. Not that she ever did.  
  
"I guess so. He wants you back, Dana. Anybody can see that."  
  
"We're just not meant to be married," she shrugged. "He knows it better than anyone, believe me."  
  
Lydia eyed her up, wondering what the story was there, but liking Dana Scully too much to risk the friendship by asking.  
  
Dana gathered up her files and slid them into her backpack, which she slung over her shoulder before scooping up her coat. "I was going to get some food and head home anyway."  
  
"...and you know, I just think it's a shame more people aren't as open-minded as you," Alice was saying as she slouched against the wall in her Tweety Bird scrubs. "My mother thinks I'm crazy, but I tell you those crystals made all the difference for me. I had this awful arthritis in my right knee and it just..." she trailed off as Mr. Mulder's attention was jerked away.  
  
"Mulder," said Dr. Scully in her smooth voice. Alice loved the way they used their last names. She thought it was sexy and cosmopolitan. Lydia thought it was weird and the sign of some kind of personality disorder; at least on his end.  
  
"Scully," he said, Alice and her crystals utterly forgotten. "I like your hair."  
  
Dana gave him a tired smile. "Why are you here?"  
  
"Is it a bad time? I could come back later."  
  
"Or you could call next time," Dana pointed out, pulling her cell phone from her pocket. "It's always on."  
  
He looked stung and she was immediately contrite. "I'm on my way to get something to eat, Mulder. Why don't you join me?"  
  
She walked briskly down the hall to the elevator, Mr. Mulder loping beside her on his considerably longer legs.  
  
"You know he's good in bed," Alice said when the elevator had closed.  
  
"Yes, he probably is," Lydia was forced to concede.  
  
  
****  
  
  
Mulder followed her into the bright cafeteria, surveying the groups of doctors and nurses and concerned family members as they clustered around the blond wood tables. Scully was negotiating with the guy at the sandwich counter.  
  
"No substitutions," he said firmly.  
  
She gave him a steely look. "I don't like Swiss and you have a whole stack of Havarti right there."  
  
"No."  
  
Scully leaned over the counter. "Give me the damned cheese. I'll pay for the extra slice."  
  
He glowered at her, unable to find a loophole, and Mulder saw that he put both kinds of cheese on her sandwich. She flung her money at the register and stalked off with the tray.  
  
"Jesus," she said, pulling out a chair at a table by the windows. "You would not believe the people who work in here."  
  
Mulder turned his chair around backwards and straddled it, watching her arrange herself.  
  
"So what's up?"  
  
"I like your new car," he said.  
  
She laughed and removed the rogue Swiss before starting in on her sandwich. "You always said BMWs were bourgeois."  
  
"They are. You make it work though. And red! I never thought you'd go for a little red number. Though you know I would." He twitched her braid and she colored a bit.  
  
"Not today, Mulder. I'm drained. Why are you here?"  
  
"I miss you," he said simply. "I want you to come back."  
  
She sighed, knowing it had been coming. "How's the kitty?"  
  
"Oh, you know. Fat and surly. He misses you too. Clawed up your bathrobe - the pink one you left because it clashed with your hair. I told him he was a good boy."  
  
"What a terrible cat," she said fondly.  
  
"Scully..." Mulder said. "I want to try again."  
  
She shook her head.  
  
He reached across the miles of table between them and ran his fingers over the white ridge of her knuckles. "You have to let him go. He's...he's gone." Mulder didn't look at her when he said it.  
  
"We're not talking about this," she snapped, snatching her hand away from him.  
  
"There's nothing you could have done, Scully. It was a car accident. It's been almost three years and I just..." His head dropped to his chest. "I just need you."  
  
She stood up, trying not to let the tears spill down her hot cheeks. How dare he come here and do this, she thought? "You don't need me, Mulder. You just don't know how to be alone on someone else's terms."  
  
He leaned forward, resting his head in his hands and gripping his hair. She saw the glint of his wedding band on his right ring finger. A lump rose in her throat and she unconsciously ran her thumb over the bare place on her left hand. Sometimes she still felt the weight of her own ring there like a phantom limb. She stroked the top of his head.  
  
"I'm sorry," she told him. "I didn't want it this way either."  
  
He looked up at her, his eyes dark and strained. "You're really happier like this?"  
  
"I'm not unhappy."  
  
"I did that? I made you unhappy?"  
  
"Mulder, come on," she implored. "We've hashed this out a hundred times."  
  
"I'm selling the house and I need you to come fill out some paperwork with me," he mumbled, jabbing her discarded cheese with a spork.  
  
"You're selling the house?" She felt unexpectedly sorrowful and sat back down.  
  
"It's too full of memories." He glanced at her. "And the neighbors ask to borrow things so they can see if I've started keeping piles of newspapers and stuff around. They always thought I was crazy. That I wasn't good enough for you. I guess they feel vindicated now," he said bitterly.  
  
"No one thought that," she told him, although she didn't actually have any idea. They had mostly kept to themselves. "So, um, where will you be living now?"  
  
"I bought an old house on a big piece of land. A few acres. Thought I might plant that vegetable garden you wanted," he added hopefully.  
  
She rubbed her eyes sleepily, grateful for waterproof mascara. "Don't do it on my account. I have a black thumb. You still working for that detective?"  
  
He shrugged. "It got pretty boring. I never cashed most of the paychecks anyway. Good old mom and dad. Their investment guy still doesn't know what to do about my indifference. I think I scare him."  
  
She smiled at him, wanting to say something wise and tender but having nothing to offer. "You should move back to New England, Mulder. You always loved it there. Did you go to the beach house yet this year?"  
  
"It's not the same without you," he confided.  
  
She looked down, remembering the last time they'd been there.  
  
  
****  
  
  
Sex on the piano. He called her Vivian and she called him Edward and they laughed and made terrible, campy jokes about her being a kind-hearted hooker out to inspire his cold, industrialist heart.  
  
He played Fur Elise while she wore his shirt and drank his father's excellent scotch.  
  
She straddled his back and rubbed almond oil into his shoulders until he flipped over and grabbed her as she shrieked. He called her Mrs. Mulder and she called him Mrs. Scully. They ended up naked in the Atlantic.  
  
They'd found William three months later.  
  
Mulder had tracked him down just a few weeks after he turned three and a half. Scully threw a cut-glass vase at the wall when he told her he'd done it. Then they'd gotten on a plane to flyover country.  
  
"We could get him back," Mulder had told her. "I never signed away any rights."  
  
She shook her head. "It's not right to take him away."  
  
He knew that.  
  
They sat huddled in the rental car, watching hungrily as their son played with a dog of nondescript appearance. William still had big blue eyes and his hair was fine and chestnut colored. He was graceful, being possessed of his father's long limbs and easy athleticism. He carefully moved an errant cricket to the grass before running down the sidewalk.  
  
Scully had smoked a pack of cigarettes in the 36 hours they were there. She coughed rustily on the plane back home. Almost six months later they bought a train table and a set of electric trains to have shipped out to where he lived with his family and his dog in their wholesome Midwestern existence.  
  
He never got it, he and his family and his dog having been killed in a car accident three days before it arrived. An 18-wheeler ran their minivan off the road.  
  
Just one of those things, the highway patrolman told Mulder when he called about the story in their small-town newspaper. Drunk driver.  
  
Mulder, having died once before, felt as though it were happening again. The cold crept over him, settling into its familiar haunts.  
  
Scully drank almost a fifth of vodka and spent an entire night vomiting into the bathtub while Mulder held her hair and told her lies about how he didn't blame her for any of it.  
  
She had been disappointed to wake up the next day, certain that God could not hate her so much as to make her keep on living. "I wish I were dead," she'd said to no one.  
  
Mulder had left just after dawn, running until he was dehydrated and lost. He didn't say much to her when he found his way back. Just offered her a jug of Gatorade and a blank face.  
  
She didn't tell him she was sorry.  
  
They continued like that for nearly four months - existing - drifting in and out of one another's way. Scully was in the second year of a pediatric residency and was gone much of the time anyway. Mulder finished the basement and started filling up a series of filing cabinets with newspaper clippings.  
  
Their anniversary rolled around and he stared at the only picture from their wedding, the ice in his glass rattling loudly in the empty house.  
  
  
****  
  
  
They'd done it on a whim when Kersh had sent word that the government was not pursuing any charges and they could come home.  
  
He'd gone to a jewelry store and used a credit card for the first time in years. Bought two platinum bands and drove out to the animal shelter where Scully worked. She was calling herself Lauren Atwater.  
  
Mulder walked in the front door and watched her silently for a minute. She wore cutoffs and an old t-shirt, her hair pulled up into a long ponytail. She was stacking bags of dog food with her lean, muscular arms. "Agent Scully!" he called.  
  
She froze, looking terrified, and stared at him like the lunatic she was certain he was.  
  
He walked over and got down on one knee, offering the ring up to her on his pinkie. "Well, what do you say?"  
  
"I say you're out of your mind."  
  
He rose, lifted her up, and kissed her in front of her co-workers, all of whom appeared as mystified as she. "Kersh says we're clear."  
  
They'd driven to the mayor's house because he was also the justice of the peace and gotten married in their t-shirts and shorts. The mayor's wife had loaned Scully her own veil and Scully grinned dazedly at the camera while Mulder beamed down at her from under his Knicks hat.  
  
Then they went to Aruba where Scully burned horribly and fell in love with Blue Curacao  
  
Got a nice house in Fairfax County while Scully wheedled and Skinner pulled strings. She started her residency and came home brimming with happiness. They spent money freely - though not carelessly - to make up for what they'd endured. They never talked about 2012.  
  
  
****  
  
  
Scully had come home late and found Mulder in the overstuffed chair, gazing at the picture as he gripped the frame too hard. She froze in the doorway.  
  
"What happened to them, Scully?" he asked of her, not looking up from the snapshot.  
  
"They didn't know any better," she said tiredly.  
  
"Do you still love me?"  
  
She felt cross and impatient with him. "I thought I was the one who should be asking you that."  
  
"That's not a very good answer," he told her.  
  
"It wasn't a very good question."  
  
He looked at her carefully. "We're just about all we've got left," he told her. The Scullys had all but shunned them both.  
  
She walked over to him and got down on her knees, laying her head in his lap. The glass of the picture frame was cool against her cheek.  
  
"He was our baby," she said. "He was never our little boy."  
  
Mulder licked his dry lips, tracing the long curve of her neck with his finger; liking the way his ring caught the light. "You did the right thing," he told her. "I know you know that, but you have to realize that I know it too."  
  
She shivered. "Does it ever stop hurting?" Knowing it didn't. Still missing her sister.  
  
He closed his eyes. "No. It never does. But it hurts less. You don't think about it all the time after a while."  
  
"I told him about you every night before bed," she said, her voice muffled by his leg. "He knew your picture."  
  
He felt his heart break.  
  
She got up and wiped her eyes, then went into their bedroom and pulled a box from the top of the closet. They looked at the tattered copy of Goodnight Moon. The tiny blue pajamas. The lock of cornsilk hair.  
  
They buried the box under the wild cherry tree in the yard.  
  
  
****  
  
  
She brought home an enormous Maine Coon from the Humane Society for his birthday in October. She wanted them to love something together. One of the cat's ears was missing a tip and his eyes were two different colors, but Scully thought he was enchanting.  
  
"What are you going to name him?" she asked, knuckling the cat's furry head as he purred appreciatively.  
  
"It'll come to me," Mulder said solemnly. "You can't rush these things."  
  
Later that week the cat snuck into the box of donuts Scully had gotten to bring to the hospital. They found him yowling in the kitchen, dusted with powdered sugar and sticky with jelly filling. Mulder named him Homer.  
  
  
****  
  
  
Mulder broached the idea of adoption not long after. Scully refused immediately.  
  
"I can't," she said.  
  
I won't, he heard.  
  
He couldn't stand the sight of her sometimes, knowing she was caring for other people's children. He stopped calling her at work and his clippings crept slowly up the walls like ivy.  
  
  
****  
  
  
"This isn't working," she blurted out one morning as Homer wound around her ankles.  
  
Mulder looked up sharply from his laptop, where he was checking news feeds of the paranormal. "Excuse me?"  
  
"This life we have, Mulder. When's the last time we had a conversation that didn't have a thousand unsaid things in it? I looked in your office the other day," she said. "You're restless."  
  
"Scully?"  
  
"I want a divorce," she told the cat.  
  
  
****  
  
  
Mulder didn't protest when she called an attorney. He helped her move her things to her trendy new condo and bought her a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue for a housewarming present. She invited him over to drink it with her on her birthday and they ended up in bed. He stayed for breakfast and did the dishes when she went to work.  
  
He showed up at the hospital later that night with cartons of Chinese food and chatted with Alice while she flirted back. Lydia glared at him disapprovingly, but he didn't care. He thought Scully looked cute in her scrubs, but she didn't usually wear them. She had on pinstripe trousers and a black sweater.  
  
"You look nice," he told her.  
  
"We're not married anymore," she reminded him.  
  
"You may reconsider," he said, holding out the fragrant bag. "Happy birthday."  
  
She smiled and led him to the elevator, leaving Alice to wonder why you'd divorce a man who looked like that and brought you dinner and still wore his wedding ring, even if it was on his right hand.  
  
  
****  
  
  
"Come up to the beach with me, Scully." She was scratching Homer under the chin while Mulder changed the oil in his car under the broiling June sun. She hadn't been over to the house for a month.  
  
"I don't think it's a good idea."  
  
"You can have your own room," he said awkwardly.  
  
She smiled. "It's not that, Mulder." Unsure of what exactly it was.  
  
He slid out from under the car, grease-stained and sweaty. She resisted the urge to smooth his hair because she couldn't touch him without feeling like she was on fire.  
  
"I miss you," he told her.  
  
"I can't stay," she said.  
  
She went to work and lost herself in other people's pain.  
  
  
****  
  
  
They went out to dinner in August and when she hugged him goodnight, she found her hands sliding under his shirt and her mouth on his collarbone.  
  
"Scully," he said hoarsely as he pulled her shirt off in her hallway.  
  
She laughed and fumbled with her lock as he unhooked her bra. How easy it is not to care what other people think of you, she realized.  
  
They scarcely made it to her bed and when she came, her skirt was around her waist.  
  
"Delilah," he teased.  
  
"Show-off."  
  
Mulder took it as a challenge and carried her into the shower. He lifted her against the slick tiles, thrusting into her under the pounding spray where the lack of friction had her at his mercy.  
  
She left scratches down his back and he was faintly dismayed when they healed.  
  
  
****  
  
  
Mulder's birthday arrived and she bought him the collector's edition of Star Trek on DVD.  
  
"Scully," he said. "Are you coming on to me?"  
  
She grinned and poured him another glass of wine. "Sorry," she said. "I don't date geeks."  
  
"I'm not asking you for a date," he murmured into her neck.  
  
She sighed, wondering what kind of woman she was when she let him unbutton her jeans. She wondered why it mattered.  
  
  
****  
  
  
And here they were again. The early December dusk like a bruise outside the window and Mulder sprawled in the birch cafeteria chair, all dark and brooding in leather and denim and cashmere.  
  
"You should come see my new place sometime," he said. "It's kind of a fixer-upper, but I think you'll like it. Very rustic."  
  
She took a bite of her sandwich. "I'd like that, Mulder." From the corner of her eye, she saw him tie a plastic straw in knots.  
  
"What is it?" she asked warily.  
  
"What's what?" His face was a little too innocent.  
  
"There's something else on your mind. Fifteen years together, Mulder. I can tell."  
  
He batted his lashes at her. "I don't know what you mean."  
  
"Yeah, yeah. Spill it."  
  
He took her hand, running his thumb against the slick surface of her nails. "Skinner called. There's this...case."  
  
She groaned. "No."  
  
"And this agent - Agent Whitney - she specifically requested my help. And Skinner asked if I'd talk to you."  
  
She rose and shrugged into her camel overcoat, pulling the rubber band from her hair and shaking the braid loose with her fingers. She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. "No."  
  
"Scully, it can't hurt just to take a look. We'd be consultants. That's all."  
  
She tugged on a pair of black calfskin gloves, grabbed her backpack, and took a last bite of the sandwich before heading from the cafeteria towards the lobby. Her heels clicked like distant gunshots and Mulder followed behind her as she pushed the door open and walked towards her car. Their shoes crunched in the snow.  
  
"Just come over and see what Skinner sent, okay? Just look at it, Scully. This guy's taking women and killing them and you should really..."  
  
"I'm done chasing monsters in the dark," she said with the note of finality he knew so well.  
  
He reached out and caught her sleeve. "I'm sorry."  
  
She whirled around, her long hair flowing like molten copper under the streetlight.  
  
"What?"  
  
"I'm sorry for coming here. For upsetting you."  
  
She stepped closer and watched their breath mingle in a frosty cloud. "It's never been about you," she told him, twirling the fringe of his scarf in her gloved hand. "You have to know that."  
  
He did.  
  
"Scully," he said, because he liked saying her name. He held her porcelain face in his hands and she smiled sadly.  
  
"You're the only one who calls me that now," she whispered. "I feel like two people."  
  
"Maybe you are." He leaned down and kissed her, and she put her arms around his neck.  
  
"Come over tonight," he said. "I'll make you dinner and you can tell me how I'm spoiling Homer and what a bad cat he is."  
  
"Okay," she agreed.  
  
He stepped back and watched her in the cone of yellow light. Snow was starting to fall again and it clung to her like lace. It was an unusually cold December.  
  
"Mulder?" she said, something hesitant - anxious - in her voice.  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
She reached into her collar and pulled out the fine gold chain. She'd strung her wedding band on it with the cross and he felt his chest warm in the stinging wind.  
  
"New necklace?" he asked, smiling.  
  
She took his hand. "It's the same one I've always worn." She squeezed his fingers and then walked to her car, which was bright as blood against the falling snow.

**Author's Note:**

> I really and truly did not plan to kill Bambi when I started writing this, but it just sort of wrote itself and nothing else quite worked. I couldn't see Mulder and Scully completely separated after all they'd been through because it simply did not ring true for the characters. Nor could I see a situation where things were safe enough for them to come back, but where they wouldn't try and get William back somehow. So this is where the story went when I tried to make those things come together.
> 
> And the married thing...yeah. I don't think they'd actually have gotten married, but there were rampart rumors of Mulder wearing a ring on his right hand, so I wanted to cover my bases just in case.


End file.
